Warning: this article contains spoilers for Peacemaker episodes 1-4.
Tensions are roiling within the Task Force X team as the butterfly threat they are attempting to thwart mounts in the latest promo for Peacemaker episode five.
The show centers around John Cena’s Christopher Smith, AKA Peacemaker, an antihero we met in James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad. Viola Davis’ Amanda Waller recruited him once again for another top-secret mission, the mysterious Project Butterfly. Warning, from here on out, the article will contain spoilers for Peacemaker episodes 1-4.
The episode five promo teases the escalating tensions between Peacemaker and Steve Agee’s John Economos, as the latter government operative reckons with his decision to frame Robert Patrick’s Auggie Smith, Christopher’s father, for a crime that Peacemaker committed — obliterating an alien-controlled civilian in the first episode.
In a heated argument, the chrome-helmeted protagonist lists a number of other hilarious alternatives John supposedly could have chosen as the fall person for Peacemaker’s crime, such as Ariana Grande, Drake, Danny DeVito, or Will Ferrell.
We’re also getting a better sense of the large scale of the threat of the mysterious “butterflies,” who, as far as we’ve been told, are people that have been taken over by insect-like parasite alien creatures that grant their host super-human strength and abilities.
Chukwudi Iwuji’s Clemson Murn, the no-nonsense leader of Task Force X’s mission to take down the butterflies, reveals the next leg of the team’s mission involves attacking their food supply. We see in the promo the team infiltrating a warehouse where a countless number of workers are creating the nectar-like substance the butterflies consume and seem to possess super-powered alien abilities, such as jumping 30 feet off the ground.
But we’ll have to see if the mission turns out to be a death sentence for the team, living up to Task Force X’s nickname, the Suicide Squad, since we found out at the end of episode four that Clemson is actually a butterfly himself.
Peacemaker episode five comes to HBO Max Jan. 27.
